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Abstract

Many studies predict that climate change will cause species movement and turnover, but few studies have considered the effect of climate change on range fragmentation for current species and/or populations. We used MaxEnt to predict suitable habitat, fragmentation and turnover for 134 amphibian species in China under 40 future climate change scenarios spanning four pathways (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6 and RCP8.5) and two time periods (the 2050s and 2070s). Our results show that climate change will cause a major shift in the spatial patterns of amphibian diversity. Suitable habitats for over 90% of species will be located in the north of the current range, for over 95% of species in higher altitudes, and for over 75% of species in the west of the current range. The distributions of species predicted to move westwards, southwards and to higher altitudes will contract, while the ranges of the species not showing these trends will expand. Amphibians will lose 20% of their original ranges on average; the distribution outside current ranges will increase by 15%. Climate change will likely modify the spatial configuration of climatically suitable areas. Changes in area and fragmentation of climatically suitable patches are related, which means that species may be simultaneously affected by different stressors as a consequence of climate change.

Raw data

Additional Information

Competing Interests

Sara Varela is an Academic Editor for PeerJ.

Author Contributions

Ren-Yan Duan conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Xiao-Quan Kong conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Min-Yi Huang conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Xiang Ji conceived and designed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31300342 and 31570417), Anhui Provincial National Science Foundation (1608085MC63), Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions and Chinese Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2014M561683). SV is supported by a postdoctoral contract at Universidad de Alcalá in Madrid, Spain. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Looks like a very nice ms. Mokhatla et al (2015) did a similar study (with fewer species and reduced scenarios) on South African frogs. However, these authors looked back to the LGM and HGM as well as to 2080. They linked fragmentation with life-history traits and found that upland species had become more fragmented in past events, but that lowland species are expected to become more fragmented.

I do have a conflict of interest as a co-author of Mokhatla et al and as an academic editor for PeerJ.

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